Diamond Stingily on her inconclusive art and proclivity for open narratives

Diamond Stingily is an artist known for her versatile practice across video, installation and sculpture, often incorporating readymade to stage interiors reminiscent of her childhood in the suburbs of Chicago. In past exhibitions, she’s presented the exquisite trappings of domestic life: battered, ornamented doors accompanied by baseball bats (Entryways, 2021), a rusted basketball hoop (in Life in My Pocket at ICA Miami, 2018) and a bright green wall-mounted telephone (Dad is Byron, 2017). When taken out of their original context, these furnishings become almost eerie in their retention of associated meaning—both hyperspecific in their homages to Stingily’s past and worldly in their potent connotations of class, violence and loss.

Yet for Sand, the artist’s most recent exhibition that ran at Greene-Naftali earlier this year, Stingily created an ensemble that forges beyond the familiar: the runway of a 52-foot long jump ending in a landing pit filled with fine silica sand. Scattered loosely in the pit were bronze-casted limbs, hands and ears, some half-emerged from the surface. Just beyond, more sand and bronze parts were nested in several standard chipboard boxes. There were traces of Stingily’s past work in the space—in the far corner, a padlocked chain-link gate segmented off two lamps and a pink velvet curtain that echoed a small photograph of a funeral parlour placed in its centre. In her 2021 solo show dead Daughter at Cabinet Gallery in Vauxhall, London, the artist referenced the atmosphere of a funeral with extravagant bouquets on pedestals, situated behind a large wrought-iron gate. Bronze hands and feet appeared to creep across the plush pink carpet. She’d developed the concept around Le testament de la fille morte (1954) by Colette Thomas, a book of letters and highly personal accounts, published under a pseudonym.

During her six-month residency with La Cité internationale des arts in Paris this past summer, Stingily set out to continue exploring ideas inspired by Thomas’s manuscript. Yet, she was also thinking about the recent loss of her mother, Sandra Stingily, who was called “Sand” by everyone she knew. A booklet published alongside the exhibition Sand comprises a few pages of the artist’s writing—moving between quotidian reflections and searing assertions about her ideas as they crystallised into work—all in her impossibly neat cursive hand.

Grappling with the ineffability of grief, the written and visual output of Stingily’s residency pushes beyond the language of concrete specifics. What Stingily transmits instead through the more abstracted work in Sand is pure feeling—and a complex feeling at that. In a previous artist statement, she’d written about being drawn to surveillance and restriction as a subject matter, themes reflected clearly in her use of objects like security cameras, gates and doors. She also remarked that she wanted to explore freedom: “No one knows the true definition of it...I think freedom is escaping past restriction but no one is truly free because in some way the human experience finds a way to restrict itself again.” The long jump’s expansive runway alludes to temporary flight, yet the landing pit of sand offers a clever contradiction: the threat of getting stuck. In this composite of paradoxical objects, the expected emotional arc folds in on itself.

STIR talks to the artist about how her writing and art practices inform one another, how she strives to avoid straightforward narratives and how concepts of motion and stasis factored into the work in Sand.

Kate Meadows: Before your exhibition Sand at Greene Naftali, you participated in a six-month residency in Paris. What did you end up reading and writing there?

Diamond Stingily: I tried to write a novel while I was there! I really like my confidence, but I didn’t accomplish writing a novel in six months. I understand that it was important for a lot of artists to go to Paris. I wasn’t reading James Baldwin, though. I thought I would have more muses in Paris, but the muses weren’t calling. They weren’t out and about like I thought they would be. But I did read Gayl Jones’ book The Healing (1998). I was reading a lot of Anna Cavan, a short story collection, Julia and the Bazooka. Because I want to write something weird. But if that’s the goal, you can’t really plan that out. You just be weird. I like weird girl stuff. Cavan was great to read for that and I read the complete stories of Leonora Carrington. She’s a painter—I was interested in reading writers who are painters, and writers who are sculptors. That intersection is necessary. Who are we to tell someone what they can and cannot do? If you want to be an artist, I think trying it all is important. You don’t have to be the perfect or the best at it. Just try it. I don’t come from a background in academia, so maybe that’s why I have that attitude. It’s not a good attitude or a bad attitude. It’s my attitude.

Kate: Do you feel that your artmaking and writing practices share influences? Do you put similar ideas into both, or are they very separate for you?

Diamond: It changes every time I answer this question. One minute I think they’re very separate. And then the next I’m like, no, I don’t care! It’s all the same. It’s all under the same umbrella of being an artist. I think today what I’m going to say is that I have fun with both and they complement one another. They hold hands, they feed each other—they have their own lives every once in a while, but they have fun together. I’m no longer trying to explain it this much, but I just feel like they flow together. It’s your second life. I mean, there are so many different types of artists, so many different realms of who you could be.

Kate: Do people try to label you as different things—installation artist, sculptor or otherwise?

Diamond: Honestly, I can’t be running around telling people what I’m not, and what I am. Do you think I’m an installation artist? Go off. Do you think I’m a sculptor? Go crazy. Do you think I’m a poet? Let’s do it. I want to define myself, I don’t want other people to do it for me. If someone says something about me that I don’t agree with, I want to speak up for myself. But sometimes someone will say something that clicks—and I thank them because I never saw it that way. I never said to anyone that I was a poet. I was so weird about that for a while, really caught up in my stuff. I don’t think it was anyone else, just my self-esteem. But once I got through that, I was just able to take a compliment. I have more confidence in myself now than when I was a younger artist. It doesn’t even come with age, it comes with experience and the growth of your craft. Especially being a woman in this field and everything that comes with that—it’s not even about growing tough skin. You just morph into what you need to become, to get what you need and want out of what you’re doing.

Kate: You had a booklet published alongside Sand, this hand-written diary-style piece, and you also published something for the show at the Cabinet. Were they similar?

Diamond: No, I had an editor for dead Daughter. It was more formal, it was more clearly based on Colette Thomas's manuscript and it was a homage to Le testament de la fille morte. This one for Greene-Naftali is much more personal. Sand is my mother’s name. As a journal entry, it’s more vulnerable.

Kate: In Sand, you open with: I thought this show was about rest but no not really. It’s not about defeat or depression. It’s not about the body or the mind. I’m not taking anyone on an exploration. What you were thinking about during this period comes through, but you’re not willing to cram it into a clear narrative. It doesn’t feel conclusive to me, and I like that. Can you tell us more about that?

Diamond: I don’t think my art is conclusive. I like to make open narratives. I avoid interpretation. I think I used to have such a control issue. I wanted to be in control of the narrative. And I don’t know if I care right now. I’m not going to say that I don’t care anymore, I can’t speak on that. But I know that right now I don’t care. In Paris, when I was thinking about the show at Greene-Naftali and what I wanted it to be “about,” I told myself not to worry about it. I told myself: worry about what you don’t want it to be about, what you don’t want to explain. I think I want to get better about not explaining myself. For Sand, I was grieving. I think I’m still grieving. In Paris, I was thinking about my mother a lot. I wanted to make work not just about her, but about that time in my life when my mother died. It really has affected and changed me in a lot of ways. I wanted to make a show that wasn’t about her death necessarily, but just the feeling of ascension. I was thinking a lot about the feelings of grief, how heavy it is, and how light it can look to other people. I was thinking about what I couldn’t articulate in words, but what it would look like in this space—this is what I could give. I was thinking about my mother, I was thinking about myself, and what ascension looks like to me.

Kate: What does ascension mean to you, by definition?

Diamond: I don’t believe it’s linear. It’s not straight. If you were to graph it, it goes up and down. That’s where the long jump piece comes from—there’s an idea of ascending, but other people might look at it and think “stuck.” It’s how you want to look at it. How do you want to flip it? I don’t use everyday found objects. I don’t look at things and say, oh, that could be art. But I thought of ascension, what it would look like to me. I imagined the long jump and wrote it down. It just made sense to me.

Kate: In addition to the long jump, you have these bronze-casted body parts sticking out from these boxes of sand. Did you make them yourself?

Diamond: This amazing artist Julie Malen helped me with them. She was in Brooklyn while I was in Paris, and we kept in touch to make sure we were on the same page. That communication is crucial to me when I’m collaborating or need help with production. You know, I’ve made casts of my own body, my face, and I can’t do it myself—you know, laying on a table and trying to get my back cast. But I like working with bronze a lot. I want to continue to work with bronze in new ways. There’s something that feels old about it. When I was a little girl, when a baby was born in my family, they’d take the baby’s shoes and bronze them. So it was a time capsule. When you cast something in bronze, you’re capsulating something.